I resisted the idea of buying a Kindle for a long time, but in trains and buses I used to stare with some fascination at other people reading on them. I liked the idea that you could pack a whole bunch of books into a tiny electronic and unobtrusive device and take it away on holiday with you – save having to lug books about in your luggage, but I wasn’t going on holiday as far as I knew.
Of course what I don’t like about E-books is that, although they get a bigger cut on each book than is possible with a traditional publisher, writers are selling their words for peanuts. But these days I’ve taken to doing reviews of other writers’ works and for that purpose, nothing could be better than a Kindle because, having finally tackled my ramshackle bookcases and reduced my books by less than half, I don’t want to end up with more books given to me for reviews, many of which [unfortunately], are likely to be mediocre or badly written.
The upshot of all this is that I did buy a Kindle, not only that, I bought a bright yellow cover to go with it to help me find it again when, in absence of mind, I put it down somewhere. I don’t think my model is the latest, but then I wasn’t aiming to have any pointless doohickies added; I just needed to be able to read with no bother. So I’ve had it a while now, and am growing slowly fonder of it as time goes by.
One of the likeable things is that when you’re waiting somewhere for someone or something, you can carry on reading where you left off, and that’s so much better than having to occupy your hands and thoughts with a mobile phone … the thing solitary people tend to do in pubs while they’re waiting for someone to join them and are feeling awkward. Or, you’re in the doctor’s waiting room and all that’s available are shiny women magazines with absurd names like Hello or Marie Claire or Elle, the kind of magazine that can put you in a bad mood before you even get into the surgery.
The Kindle experience isn’t ‘physical’ of course in that you can’t run your fingers over the book jacket, it doesn’t smell of anything, you can’t fan yourself with it when it’s hot, it is too slender to use for hanging doors or propping open broken sash windows, and you can’t hollow out the pages and use it like a box in which to hide things like guns or cash. Another downside is that you can’t see how much of the book is left to read. With physical books, I tend to estimate what’s left to read quite frequently, if not particularly consciously as I go along. That could account for the fact that I often don’t finish a novel. I usually find about three quarters of the way through that I’ve grown bored with it, it’s going on and on, there are too many words, the pace is too slow, there is too much extraneous information. So I think I feel justified when I’m more than half way through, to say goodbye to it and make up my own ending. Now, on a Kindle, I’m not sure you can quite behave like that, although at the bottom in tiny figures you’re told what percentage of it you’ve read. I daresay, I could continue with my old ways and stop reading at 75%.
It took me a while to figure out how to download books onto the thing. But, keeping my hysteria at bay, I managed to come across the fact that each Kindle has its own email address which you can locate if you go to Amazon. So you just attach the book to this email and wing it across … to yourself. There is at least one other way you can do the transfer, but I think email is the easiest. So, it turns out I am going on holiday after all, and I will be looking for some good reading material to take with me on this tiny wee thing. However, although it’s incredibly practical and is serving me quite well, when it comes to writers whom I admire for their wit, skill, style and content, my instinct is to buy the physical book and in hardback form if I can, and so all the sensual experiences of the physical book will be centred on just a few really cracking writers, which of course is a good thing.
